Inquiries into philosophic issues, especially
moral issues, within the field of social science are
sparse and generally limited to the discipline of
philosophy where they remain inaccessible to social
scientists despite their importance to the field.
Even rarer are philosophic inquiries that are
conducted by social scientists themselves and
presented in a language accessible to the general
social scientist. This parsimonious style is what
makes The meaning of mind: language, morality, and
neuroscience such an important book to begin
exploring certain philosophic dimensions of social
science.

Szasz sets out to probe one of the most
conceptually difficult ideas in social science--the
mind. Clarifying this crucial concept has plagued
scientists for centuries and will indubitably do so
for many more. Nonetheless it is vitally important
that we understand what we mean when we utilize the
"mind" in our investigations into human phenomena.

To Szasz the mind originates in the Hellenic
civilization. The Greeks utilized the mind as a verb
meaning to heed and as such was characterized as an
observable property. Hence, one minded the baby or
was told to never mind. Over time the concept changed
and assumed a dual identity, that of both verb and
noun. As a noun the mind initially characterizes a
soul. With the increasing importance of the
institution of science came another change in the
conceptualization of mind. The secularization of the
mind removed the soul and replaced it with thought
which entails our beliefs, desires, and wants.
Further transformations have since relegated the mind
to the brain.

Depositing the mind in the brain carries several
repercussions for the human sciences that are rarely
attended to and this is what alarms Szasz. As a verb
the concept mind explicitly contains agency, that is
responsibility. According to Szasz, relegating the
mind to the brain deprives the mind of this critical
human component. This occurs through the process of
reification. Reification is regarding something [End page 25] abstract as a material or concrete thing. By
locating the mind in the brain organic dysfunctions
eliminate intentional actions. Therefore the brain
causes all human actions. If this is so, one is no
longer responsible for their actions because said
actions originate in the brain and not in one's
beliefs, desires, and wants.

Clearly this is troublesome for several reasons.
First, it is an iniquitous mistake to reify such a
blatantly non-material concept. Projecting an
observable reality to the mind violates Descartes'
claim that the mind is a different substance than the
rest of nature. Descartes argued this because we
can't doubt the existence of the mind, whereas we can
doubt the existence of the body and the brain. We can
imagine waking up and missing a finger, but we can't
wake up and doubt that we have a mind, because who
would make this assessment if one had a mind?

If Descartes is right, and the mind is not
matter, then causal relations can't exist because
spatial connections are a necessity of causality
(Rosenberg 1988, Chapter 2). Another problem is that
for the mind to be the brain, the brain must then have
intentional content, i.e. coded representations of our
beliefs, desires, and wants. How can thoughts have
physical representation? If my belief that a gun is
dangerous is encoded somewhere in the brain how does
this physical arrangement become interpreted? Someone
or something must then interpret these codes engrained
in our brain, that is provide the meaning (i.e.
intentional content) contained in my belief that guns
are dangerous. These questions can't be answered
today, perhaps ever, but should we proceed down this
path with only the faint hope that somehow in the
future we can logically connect the mind to the brain?

A second problem also arises by putting the mind
in the brain, we remove responsibility from being
human, and that in turn is dehumanizing. It
eviscerates the very core of being a human, which is,
exerting influence over one's own life. As the
underground man in Dostoevsky's Notes from
underground so eloquently decries: "One's own free,
untrammeled desires, one's own whim, no matter how
extravagant, one's own fancy, be it wrought up at
times to the point of madness--all of this is precisely
that most advantageous of advantages which is omitted,
which fits no classification, and which is constantly
knocking all the systems and theories to hell" (p.
28). If the mind is encoded in the brain the
effervescent spirit that has marked the mind since its
conception as a noun is killed. We also kill
Aristophanes' beautiful verse in The birds, "By
words the mind is winged" (Line 1447) because how can
an encoded existence be altered by ethereal words.

For example, someone who repeatedly gets drunk
and behaves immorally can't be punished if we locate
the mind in the brain because they are not responsible [End page 26] for their actions; instead it is the fault of synaptic
misfiring or excessive levels of serotonin. Their
immorality is not immoral because a determined action
is morally neutral; thus they are not responsible.
Only if free will or intentionality marks such
behavior can a moral assessment be made. In fact, our
laws explicitly demand that if one is not responsible
for one's actions we can't punish them, instead we
must treat or habilitate them.

To Szasz this is a catastrophic mistake because
we supplant moral discourse with a medical discourse
that convincingly solves moral problems. Moral issues
are troublesome and messy but inherent in all realms
of human life. Szasz correctly asserts that it is
impossible to solve moral problems, we must instead
focus on "re-solving" them (p. 38). However by
putting the mind in the brain we confer an all-
explanatory cause to a physical substance (p. 108).
The brain becomes God, omnipotent in all the realms of
human life as each of us follows our determined and
Fated existence.

Now it would be unfair to characterize the mind
as being outside the realm of influence by the body.
We do know that certain processes in the brain exert
influence on the mind, whatever it is. We know that
our moods can be influenced by neurochemical
reactions. However, the influence is at best of minor
significance. The problem is putting sapient and
sentient creatures under the total influence of the
brain. Like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, those that
locate the mind in the brain spuriously impute a
function where a function is unlikely to exist.

If the mind, at this time, can't be logically
connected to the brain, why does this conception
persist?

Medicine's will to power

Thomas Szasz in, The meaning of mind: Language,
morality, and neuroscience, painstakingly illuminates
the scientific and political turmoil that develops
when definitional discipline is abandoned. This
absurd condition of the human sciences, treating
humans as anything but human, has become conventional
in certain facets of the human sciences and even more
problematic in ordinary discourse. While Szasz
excellently describes the malady of the mind guiding
most human research nowdays, he presents no
explanation of how such a condition could arise within
the scientific realm. An adequate characterization of
this movement away from considering morality
imperative for understanding humans resides within the
voluminous body of work by Friedrich Nietzche.

In the puritanical rush towards emulating the
technologically efficient sciences, the human sciences [End page 27] exenterate what is exactly at the core of being a
human being; morality, responsibility, and
accountability. To be human means to be able and
willing to function as a responsible member of society
and society must be able and willing to ascribe such a
status on them. A human being without moral agency is
not a "true" human being. Since the human sciences
inquire into humans, it cannot seriously escape moral
issues. The claims for a morally neutral science are
difficult to attain in the human sciences and may not
be desirable in the first place. To treat a value as
a fact is one of the most fundamental mistakes science
can make.

Of the several deleterious side effects that
arose from the positivistic movement in science, of
which we are now in the midst of handling the
repercussions, one of the most catastrophic in the
human sciences was the casting away of morality as a
scientific concern. Science thrust the discarded
remains of morality into the esoteric domains of
philosophy and religion where they have generally
languished for the last century or so. Free from the
constraint of treating a "subject" as a "human" the
human sciences blindly set about to "deconstruct"
humans. Ironically, this "deconstruction" of humans
centers primarily on setting up the framework for "re-
constructing" bad, faulty, sick, or mis-constucted
humans. And to consider something as sick, bad, or
faulty is to make a normative claim, which by
definition is value laden. Hence, the concern is
moral, but with "morality" never able to enter the
scientific dialogue.

The brilliant and unabashed philosopher Nietzche
prophesized, (and cheerfully advocated the fulfillment
of such a movement), that humanity had surpassed a
crucial juncture in its "moral" history and its
"moral" future. This juncture marked the battle for
life, a battle beyond good and evil because life is
beyond good and evil. Life that is living, and not
dying, exhibits what Nietzche labels a "will to
power." This "will to power" is the organisms'
striving to master their environment in a manner
suitable to themselves, and in principle only
themselves. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending
on where you reside in this web of power, Others are
out there.

These Others are also willing themselves to
power. This "will to power" is never equal, so it
greatly varies across individuals, groups, nations,
and cultures. To Nietzche, this "will to power"
undergirded the necessity of assembling groups,
nations, and other collectivities to provide either
safety from Others "will to power" or an avenue to
gain power from Others.

In The genealogy of morals, Nietzche also
argues that a master-slave relationship is the [End page 28] fundamental substratum of all societies. Thus,
domination and exploitation are the basic principles
binding all of us together. So all unions of Others
exhibit this basic structure. Each, master and slave,
resides within a separate existential realm but is
always fated to meet at a point of fundamental
conflict--who and what is morally desirable. The
struggle over whom wears the hat of master and who
wears the hat of slave is the primordial battle over
the shaping of society's moral attributes. That is,
morality, which in itself is unnecessary and
artificial because it fluctuates over time and space;
is therefore un-natural, arising as a side-effect out
of the "political" battle between masters and slaves.
In this view, political power equates with
psychological superiority. Hence, the will to power
is a will to shape morality. Nietzche's immortal
apothegm, "God is dead," perfectly marked the rupture
with mankind's past. Morality was no longer external
to man--it was in man.

God's death was but temporary though, and as
Nietzche insisted; God would hide in various caves
around the world. God has come out of hiding. The
urge to assign order and chaos outside ourselves
persisted until a gentle, so subtle,
transmogrification occurred. God wasn't recognizable
at first but he was alive. A new, but familiar,
master was resurrected. The new God, our new master,
born from our own sweat and blood, was science and
medicine.

By viewing the mind as the brain within
Nietzche's generalization of humankind's path to the
future brings to light the political and moral
entrepenuership of the medical field as they exert
their will to power. (The medicalization of human
frailties has been well documented elsewhere, see
Conrad and Schneider's, The medicalization of
deviance, for an excellent exploration of medical
interpretations supplanting moral ones.) By
increasing the body of human actions, within their
purview, medicine's stature as a power broker in
morality increases exponentially. The question is
whether society would desire such a will to power?
Maybe David Rothman was correct in his argument that
certain problems in society are best dealt with by
removing them from our conscience because that is the
most expedient resolution to the problem (Conscience
and convenience: The asylum and its alternatives in
progressive America). Nonetheless, the issue is
whether we want to be slaves to the medicine master?

Let the debate begin

Thomas Szasz does an excellent job of setting up
the foundation of a healthy and necessary dialogue on
how we define the mind and the effects of defining it
within the language of neuroscience. No matter how we
conceive of the mind philosophic problems arise. It [End page 29] is our duty and obligation as scientists to probe the
definitional clarity by which we operate in producing
viable knowledge. Since the knowledge social
science produces is used to guide human behavior, we
must be careful not to present contaminated or flawed
knowledge. If social science inevitably is moral
knowledge, we can't escape delineating the moral
choices we have taken. Therefore, social science
can't escape philosophy and philosophy can't escape
social science.